coloring books

What’s the very latest in the bright kaleidoscopic world of color? Let’s reach into the grab bag and find out. Many of you know I’m a sucker for oddball coloring books. So I just about leapt out of my skin at this 1971 J.C. Penney advertisement, pushing the color-block look: Another of my (numerous) color...

Coloring is an inherently tongue-in-cheek activity: after all, it’s premised on the genteel fiction that an untalented amateur filling in the colors actually completes an artwork. Rightly or not, we’ve come a long way from the civilized era of Couleru’s 1860 coloring book Nouveau Cours Élémentaire de Coloris et d’Acquerelle. But when you need...